Very much an inaugural figure in the history of twentieth-century Canadian literature and in the development of contemporary Canadian culture, Bertram Brooker assumes his lasting historical and cultural significance through association with Canadian literature's various comings of age and especially with its merging with other media forms. That Brooker should have received formal recognition both from Lord Tweedsmuir for his contributions to the literary field and from Who's Who for his contributions to the field of advertising is not at all incongruous in a career characterized by fervent participation in journalistic, critical, technical, and creative writing, and in the commercial and fine arts. As the first recipient of the Governor General's Award for Fiction (1936), Brooker heads the list (temporally if not qualitatively) of Canada's most prestigious writers. As an advertising executive whose literary pursuits conformed to the principles of business and communication, he anticipated the typographical and typological...